Like the submerged nine-tenths of an iceberg, the workhorses and coalface-diggers of the British film industry have been shoved out of sight, working away unseen to support and ballast the marquee names out front. It's only occasionally that we are afforded a glimpse of the subworld of the Ealing cutting rooms, the Pinewood sound stages, the Elstree canteen. The talent is not quite high-tone enough to attract the attentions of an admiring biographer (David Lean, Emeric Pressburger, et al), but not quite so unregarded that self-publication is the only option. Think Val Guest's So You Want to Be in Pictures, or Roy Ward Baker's The Director's Cut.

But they were directors. It's still rarer to hear from the true backroom boys, and editor Jim Clark is one of the very few to have put his head above the parapet. No one would pretend his memoir is a polished literary endeavour, but his journey from rewind boy on an Ealing comedy (The Titfield Thunderbolt) to hobnobbing in the cutting room with Mike Leigh takes him – and us – on a trip through the vagaries of a working life in British cinema, with all its ups and downs. Clark's path takes him through the 60s new wave, the 1970s collapse and a late 70s/early 80s trek out to Hollywood, by which time he was sufficiently well established to merit a call from the Bond production line to take on The World Is Not Enough.

Very much a product of the film society generation, Clark went from a wartime boarding school, where he helped order the films for the Sunday screenings, to a traineeship at Ealing, then in the midst of the great series of comedies that still bear its marque. An apprenticeship in those days meant a thorough grounding in dull, repetitive tasks – joining film, marking tape, ferrying cans of stock. Despite the wearisome work, Clark has a fine eye, and offers insightful detail. "The studio," he says, "was class-ridden. You knew your station and stayed in it, or incurred wrath in high places … A big sign exhorted us to great effort, just like something you might have seen in China during the cultural revolution. It read, 'The Studio That Pulls Together.'"

After briefly endangering his ascent up the ladder by having the temerity to edit a Children's Film Foundation production, Clark found himself the beneficiary of Hollywood's postwar decamp to Europe. Stanley Donen was the first big-name director to take him on ("Stanley was the first person I ever saw eating yogurt"), giving Clark his first shot as lead editor on the Yul Brynner comedy Surprise Package ("I already had a fair inkling … that Brynner was not God's gift to comedy"). Clark would soon progress on to his first significant project, 1961's The Innocents, the atmospheric ghost story adapted from The Turn of the Screw. One anecdote demonstrates how deeply media attention can affect even the most disinterested artist: Clark relates how The Innocents' director, Jack Clayton, smashed a plaster model of the film's set in a rage because he was half an hour late reporting the reaction from the film's first press screening.

The Innocents put Clark into the premier league, and he went on to form a close working relationship with one of the leading lights of the British 60s generation, John Schlesinger. He cut five films for Schlesinger – but not, annoyingly, Midnight Cowboy, though he did work on it unofficially, credited as "creative consultant", after Schlesinger fell out with the American editor.

Clark briefly had his own career as a director – resulting in some of his funniest stories. He shot a documentary for the army in Germany, and was appalled by the chaos he unleashed after giving the soldiers beer ("events had taken on the atmosphere of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch"). He finally packed in directing after filming a disastrous Ned Sherrin script called Rentadick ("it comes up regularly on late night television to embarrass me").

Of his time working for David Puttnam when the latter was CEO of Columbia in the late 80s, he says it was a lurch from one nightmare to another. In hindsight, of course, we know Puttnam's days at the studio were numbered. Ironically, the film that was most loudly mocked after Puttnam left was a proper masterpiece, Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gyspies. ("Apparently there was much laughter … when it was announced it was in Serbian.")

Now he's retired, it's evident that stories like Clark's act as a kind of glue between different phases in cinema evolution, a reminder that film-making doesn't stop dead when one movement runs out of steam and another emerges. It helps, too, if you are self-deprecating and level-headed about your achievements.